Plant Proteins Are Smaller Because They Are Encoded by Fewer Exons than Animal Proteins.

ABSTRACT: Protein size is an important biochemical feature since longer proteins can harbor more domains and therefore can display more biological functionalities than shorter proteins. We found remarkable differences in protein length, exon structure, and domain count among different phylogenetic lineages. While eukaryotic proteins have an average size of 472 amino acid residues (aa), average protein sizes in plant genomes are smaller than those of animals and fungi. Proteins unique to plants are ∼81aa shorter than plant proteins conserved among other eukaryotic lineages. The smaller average size of plant proteins could neither be explained by endosymbiosis nor subcellular compartmentation nor exon size, but rather due to exon number. Metazoan proteins are encoded on average by ∼10 exons of small s

SUBMITTER: Ramirez-Sanchez O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5200936 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature